Electronically-communicated messages (“electronic messages”) such as email, paging messages, and voice mail have become increasingly popular and pervasive in recent years. For the creator of an electronic-message, the ability to send the message to one or more recipients provides for quick and efficient communication. Such communication via electronic messages has become common in both business and personal settings.
While the initial distribution of electronic messages by a sender is quick and convenient, ensuring that an electronic message is delivered (i.e., received by the recipient) and reviewed (e.g., reading an email or paging text, viewing an email image, listening to a voice mail message, etc.) within a certain time frame is not convenient. Due to the asynchronous nature of most electronic message transmission systems, immediate feedback is not provided as to whether the electronic message has been reliably received by each of the recipients. Some transmission systems provide a facility such that if an error is detected by a sending system (e.g., a recipient system is currently unavailable at the time of sending, the sending system may attempt to resend the electronic message. In such systems, if the error reoccurs, the transmission system typically notifies the sender that delivery failed. Thus, the sender receives no indication that message delivery problems exist until after an amount of time, which can be lengthy, has elapsed. In other transmission systems, the sender will receive no notification even if the delivery of the electronic message fails.
Moreover, even if the delivery of an electronic message to a recipient is successful, it if often important that the recipient review the electronic message within a certain amount of time. Transmission systems typically do not provide a mechanism to reliably ensure that a recipient has reviewed a successfully delivered message. A few transmission systems allow the sender to request notification when an electronic message is received by a recipient and when it is accessed (e.g., opened by an application program with which the recipient can review the message) by the recipient. In some such systems, the recipient's system will provide to the sender's system a delivery receipt or a review receipt to provide notification when delivery or review of an electronic message has occurred. Thus, if a review receipt has not yet been received, then the recipient may not have reviewed the electronic message. However, the sender has no automatic means of prompting or convincing the recipient to review the electronic message. Finally, if it desirable that some action be automatically performed after a recipient has reviewed an electronic message (e.g., sending a follow-up message), there is no automatic means of providing this functionality.